• Installation
• Get Started
• What's Next
• Contributing

At this time, only Windows is supported. We recommend to use ExpressCPP together with Visual Studio.

Download the necessary files (some .lib and .h files) from the release page.

Create or use existing C++ project. Right click the project in solution view, and include the path to the header and lib files. Under C/C++ > General > Additional Include Directories, edit to add the path that contains the the header files. Similarly, under Linker > General > Additional Library Directories, edit to add the path that contains the lib files.

ExpressCPP requires Ws2_32.lib which should be already installed on your computer.

First, create a Express instance. We recommend use singleton pattern but it is not required.

#include "CExpress\express.h"

#ifdef _DEBUG
#pragma comment(lib, "CExpress\\express_debug.lib")
#else
#pragma comment(lib, "CExpress\\express_release.lib")
#endif  

int main() {
    CExpress::Express ex;
}

The above example, I put all the headers and lib files under directory CExpress that is at the same level as this code file. _DEBUG flag will be defined if you set "Debug" in the configuration manager.

using namespace CExpress is ok if you know it does not create any ambiguity.

Then, we can create a controller:

ex.route("GET", "/", [=](Request & req, Response & res) {
  res.body = "<h1>Hello World</h1>";
  res.headers["Content-Type"] = "text/html; charset=utf-8";
});

If the request url match multiple controllers, only the first one we find will be executed.

Lastly, start the server:

ex.start(8080);

That's it! The complete code for hello world program is

#include "CExpress\express.h"

#ifdef _DEBUG
#pragma comment(lib, "CExpress\\express_debug.lib")
#else
#pragma comment(lib, "CExpress\\express_release.lib")
#endif 

int main() {
    CExpress::Express ex;
    ex.route("GET", "/", [=](Request & req, Response & res) {
        res.body = "<h1>Hello World</h1>";
        res.headers["Content-Type"] = "text/html; charset=utf-8";
    });
    ex.start(8080);
}

Note that you need to set the content type to html if you are passing back html to the client. Because you are taking reference of Request and Response it is unnecessary to return anything. Also, ex.start(8080) needs to be the last line of your program.

Create a middleware by

ex.use([=](Request & req, Response & res) {
    // process the request and response here
});

The execution of middleware is the same as your declaration order.

Crate an error handler like this:

ex.onerror("404", [=](Request & req, Response & res) {
    // process error here
});

If you define multiple error handlers for the same error code, the one that actually runs will be random. We are internally using unordered_map.

For more complete documentation, visit our website.

We love your feedback. This repository is under MIT license. Fork as you like 👍.

©️ 2017 The Aleph Team